Packaging plastic bottles is a labour intensive operation, and it presents some challenges for automation especially when the system is required to handle multiple products with complex packing configurations.
In this particular application, the automation solution was required to bag and palletise sauce bottles that are tapered and packed with every second bottle rotated upside down to minimise the packaging volume. Apex Automation and Robotics delivered an end-to-end complete turnkey system for inspecting, bagging and palletising these HDPE sauce bottles. The system includes:
- A pallet dispenser
- 4 robots
- 2 baggers
- 2 wide-belt buffer conveyors
- 2 QC inspection stations
The system can be divided into 2 robotic cells looking after 2 blow moulding machines, with a pallet dispenser in the middle delivering pallets to both cells. As they exit the moulding machine, the bottles are transferred to the QC inspection station that includes a check-weigher, metal detector, leak tester and a vision
Defective bottles are ejected off the line and the good bottles are transferred to the robotic cell for packaging. Each robotic cell has a proprietary automatic bagger, a robot that creates the pack, and another robot that loads the pack into the bagger then palletises the bags.
There were two major challenges in this project:
- The bottles are light and not stable
- Complex packing configuration with each second bottle rotated upside down to minimise the volume of the packs.
To overcome these challenges, vacuum conveyors are used in key sections areas to keep the bottles from falling off. To achieve the complex configuration, the packing robot picks one row of bottles, spaces them apart then places them in the packing station. In the following cycle, the bottles are both spaced apart and rotated upside down before placing. This is repeated until a full pack is formed.
The bottles are packed on precision trays, and once a pack is completed, a large robot picks up the tray, loads it in the Bagger then palletises the bag. The complete pallets exit the robotic cell and accumulate at the end of a dual chain conveyor, ready to be unloaded by the forklift or AGV.
The system is controlled by a Compact Logix PLC with integrated safety interfacing with the blowmoulding machines, robots controllers, baggers and QC stations over an Ethernet/IP local area network LAN.
This is the latest addition to our end-of-line automation solutions for the Plastics and Food industries, enabling our clients to produce very high quality products at lower cost than their competition.
